living, and it's to
your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in
the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand? I won't have
it. That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To
have her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of
little, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now, understand, I won't have it!
You don't know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to
have suffered. If you had brought two children into the world----"

So, then, it had come about during the years between their childhood
and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their
confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to
understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.

"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How
can I hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."

This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and
became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old
frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was
something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear,
that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin
house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the
Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best
residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The
hall console alone was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your
heart.

The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam and
flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer,
always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch on
his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for
style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around.
Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would
not go home to dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee
over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank
quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She had
been with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer she
had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on her
b